


The Shoulders of Giants

by Prochytes



Category: Doctor Who (1963), Torchwood
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-05-24
Updated: 2011-05-24
Packaged: 2017-10-19 18:07:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 272
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/203767
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Prochytes/pseuds/Prochytes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Seek not to question other than the books she left behind.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Shoulders of Giants

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers for TW 2x13 “Exit Wounds”. Written for santousha’s Tosh comment!fic jamboree on LJ in 2009 and reposted with minor changes. Newton and Kipling respectively supply the title and the summary.

Extract from the _Dictionary of Mathematical Biography_ (twelfth edition: Oxford, 2107):

  
 **“Sato, Toshiko”** ( _d. c._ 2009), author of the “Sato papers”, is “perhaps the most celebrated enigma in pure mathematics since the time of Fermat” (Gibbons, 7). In November 2009, Elizabeth Shaw ( _q. v._ ), of Newnham College, Cambridge, was contacted by one Captain James Harper, seeking her opinion on some mathematical papers which, he stated, had recently come into his possession, on the premature death of their author. Shaw’s own epochal work in group theory was then nearing completion, but the quality of what would become known as the “Sato papers” was such that she immediately set aside time to edit them. On publication, in 2011, they were swiftly recognized as making fundamental contributions to many branches of number theory and analysis: above all, in the development of the “Sato method”, and of techniques that would subsequently prove fruitful in the study of the Heriot conjecture.

The author of this body of work remains a mystery. According to Shaw’s later account of the correspondence, Harper divulged little on the topic, saying only that her name had been Toshiko Sato, and, cryptically, that “everyone should see”. The theory, briefly fashionable, that Shaw was herself the pseudonymous author of the papers is no longer entertained by serious scholars: “it is as likely that Shaw invented Sato as that Littlewood invented Hardy” (Gibbons, 271). The style and state of completion which the “Sato papers” display suggest that they are exactly what Harper claimed them to be: the work of an otherwise unknown mathematician, cut off, like Galois and Abel ( _q. q. v._ ), before her time.


End file.
